We’re all living inside echo chambers already. Nobody wants to be forcibly fed a “balanced” online media diet. Just imagine what the feed would be like if it contained an equal amount of content from every social media platform in the world with all possible views being represented. People would either not want to engage with it at all, would just fight and argue all day or start blocking opposing views to get back into the echo chamber. I think people should be free to choose for themselves what kind of content they consume.

I couldn’t agree more. Human moderators, especially unpaid ones simply aren’t the way to go and Lemmy is a perfect example of this. Blocking users and communities and using content filters works to some extent but is extemely blunt tool with a ton of collateral damage. I’d much rather tell an AI moderator what I’m interested in seeing and what not and have it analyze the content to see what needs to be filtered out.

Take this thread for example:

Cool. I think he should piss on the 3rd rail.

This pukebag is just as bad as Steve. Fuck both of them.

What a cunt.

How else is anyone going to filter out hateful content like this with zero value without an intelligent moderation system? People are coming up with new insults faster than I can keep adding them to the filter list. AI could easily filter out 95% of toxic content like this.

By free will I mean the ability to have done otherwise. This, I argue is an illusion. What ever the reason is that makes one choose A rather than B will make them choose A over and over again no matter how many times we rewind the universe and try again. What ever compelled you to make that choise remains unchanged and you’d choose the same thing every time. There’s no freedom in that.

I also don’t see a reason why humans would be unique in that sense. If we have free will then what leads you to believe that other animals don’t? If they can live normal lives without free will, then surely we can too, right?

I don’t know where our curiousity or the desire to help the less fortunate comes from. Genes and environmental factors most likely. That’s why cultural differences exists too. If we all just freely chose our likes and not-likes then it’s a bit odd that people living in the same country have similar preferences but the people on the other side of the world are significantly different.

Also, have you read about split brain experiments? When the corpus callosum is severed which prevents the different brain hemispheres from communicating with each other we can then with some clever tricks interview the different hemispheres separately and the finding there is that they tend to have vastly different preferences. Which hemisphere is “you”?

Then please explain your reasoning. Statements alone are meaningless if you’re unable to back them up with explanations.

Who wants AGI other than war pigs and billionaires?

Every single person suffering from a chronic / terminal illnes for example. If a problem can be solved, then AGI can solve it.

Why is AGI not in reach? What insight do you have on the matter than you can so confidently make an absolute statement like that?

That’s not my argument at all. I never said an algorithm is AI just because it has many steps. The key difference isn’t complexity - it’s the nature of what the algorithm does. A Tic-Tac-Toe AI can be extremely simple yet still counts as AI where as something like a game physics engine is extremely complex yet it doesn’t simulate intelligence, just physics. Bubble sort follows a fixed sequence with no decision-making. A chess engine, on the other hand, evaluates different moves, predicts outcomes, and optimizes decisions based on a strategy. That’s not just ‘many steps’ - it’s a process of selecting the best action based on the current situation. If you think my argument is about complexity rather than decision-making, you’ve misunderstood my point.

What is inevitable? At no point have I claimed that our actions are set in stone. That would imply fatalism which equally suggest that things can happen without anything causing them to happen.

I want chocolate, I don’t eat chocolate, exercise of free will.

There’s a reason you don’t eat chocolate - likely health concerns or fear of weight gain. Your desire to stay healthy is stronger than your desire to eat chocolate. But you can’t take credit for that any more than you can blame an alcoholic for their inability to resist drinking.

Bubble sort is just a basic set of steps for sorting numbers - it doesn’t make choices or adapt. A chess engine, on the other hand, looks at different possible moves, evaluates which one is best, and adjusts based on the opponent’s play. It actively searches through options and makes decisions, while bubble sort just follows the same repetitive process no matter what. That’s a huge difference.

How’s insulting the people respectfully disagreeing with you working out so far? That ad-hominem was completely uncalled for.

It’s not. Bubble sort is a purely deterministic algorithm with no learning or intelligence involved.

pretending LLMs are AI

LLMs are AI. There’s a common misconception about what ‘AI’ actually means. Many people equate AI with the advanced, human-like intelligence depicted in sci-fi - like HAL 9000, JARVIS, Ava, Mother, Samantha, Skynet, and GERTY. These systems represent a type of AI called AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), designed to perform a wide range of tasks and demonstrate a form of general intelligence similar to humans.

However, AI itself doesn’t imply general intelligence. Even something as simple as a chess-playing robot qualifies as AI. Although it’s a narrow AI, excelling in just one task, it still fits within the AI category. So, AI is a very broad term that covers everything from highly specialized systems to the type of advanced, adaptable intelligence that we often imagine. Think of it like the term ‘plants,’ which includes everything from grass to towering redwoods - each different, but all fitting within the same category.

Third, it would need free will.

I strongly disagree there. I argue that not even humans have free will, yet we’re generally intelligent so I don’t see why AGI would need it either. In fact, I don’t even know what true free will would look like. There are only two reasons why anyone does anything: either you want to or you have to. There’s obviously no freedom in having to do something but you can’t choose your wants and not-wants either. You helplessly have the beliefs and preferences that you do. You didn’t choose them and you can’t choose to not have them either.

Better get off the internet then if porn and violence is too much to handle.

Doing the scanning on-device doesn’t mean that the findings cannot be reported further. I don’t want others going thru my private stuff without asking - not even machine learning.

so you can just move on

Oh, you’re highly underestimating my capability to get stuck in the little things

Maybe this is one of those autism things again but I’m really annoyed by this headline format and I wish articles would stop using it.

I don’t have a boss, nor an office job. Stop assuming that everyone does.

I think the idea with carbon capture is mostly that you power it with the excess you’re getting from renewables. Finland for example has so much wind turbines that when it’s windy they produce much more energy than the country consumes. In moments like this it makes sense to put this energy into something like carbon capture or hydrogen production.

I don’t get how this is even worth writing an article about.